“I’m not sure you mean that as a compliment.”
“I’m not either,” said Starr.
Of course, I could have gone to Deputy Granger and put the story straight. I should have gone to Granger, but I didn’t know quite what would happen if I did. Plus, it was so much easier not to. I figured Portis wouldn’t have cared either way. Cutler had decided about him years ago, and what good did it do to try and change a bunch of narrow minds now that he’d already gone off to the other side? Portis would want me to keep my head down and go on about my business, at least that’s what I told myself once I’d decided it was what I was going to do anyway.
They put out some stories on the news about Jenna, but none of them had to do with how she got to the hospital. None of them mentioned a fever or bothered to touch on her current condition. All they talked about was some emergency hearing and the “safe haven” law. They said Jenna was in temporary foster care, but I’d been there twice myself as a kid and always wound up back with Carletta.
There was nothing on the news about Kayla Hawthorne, about how she was passed out on the floor of that farmhouse while Jenna got snowed on by an open window, and I was starting to worry that everything we went through in the north hills would be for nothing. That Jenna would be delivered right back to where she started.
We dined at the Elias Brothers that night in Portis’s honor. I sat beside Starr in the booth and it was good to be beside my sister, to smell her twenty-dollar, cucumber-melon shampoo while Bobby sat across the table with his Detroit Tigers hat pulled low over his eyes.
“He was rough around the edges,” Starr said. “But he was all goo in the middle.”
“I wish I would have known him better,” Bobby said.
“He liked you,” I said. “He liked that you and Starr were together. He said he knew your uncle.”
Bobby nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “Uncle Karl.”
“You remember the aliens?” Starr said, and plunked a handful of fries in some ketchup.
I shook my head and smiled. It was my favorite Portis story of all.
“Of course I remember the aliens,” I said.
“This was back when we were all living together,” Starr said, and turned to Bobby.
“We were in those old apartments over on Petoskey Street,” I said.
“Right,” Starr said. “The rat factory.”
“They were mice,” I said.
“Either way,” Starr said. “The point is that they were really nice apartments and we were living there with Portis when he disappeared for two days, which wasn’t really a big deal. The thing was, he’d missed work and they’d already called and told Carletta to let him know he was no longer needed. Mama was pissed.”
“He’d gone to the arcade,” I said.
“That’s where he ran into, what was that guy’s name?”
“Trout,” I said. “I don’t know what his actual name was, but everybody called him Trout.”
“Right,” Starr said. “Fucking Trout. Which is important to the story because he had that misshapen jaw.”
By misshapen, Starr meant long as hell. Or, more to the point, troutlike. Plus he had the generally dazed expression of Cutler’s prized river fish.
“In the history of the world,” I said. “No man has ever looked more like a trout, than Trout himself.”
“I think I might have heard of that guy,” Bobby said.
“Yeah,” said Starr. “He won a Nobel Prize. Anyway, Portis and Trout eventually tired of the arcade and wound up at Paradise Junction. A shocking turn of events. So two days disappear and then Portis shows back up.”
“We came in from the grocery store and he was passed out on the couch,” I said. “And Mama got right in his shit. ‘Where have you been? What have you been doing? Are you aware of the fact that you’ve been fired?’”
“Never mind the fact that Carletta hadn’t worked in months,” said Starr.
“Right,” I said. “He probably should have pointed that out. But what Portis did was sit up and launch into this story about how him and Trout had been abducted by aliens.”
“Honest to fucking God,” Starr said. “Aliens!”
“This was when there was a bunch of shows on cable about alien abductions,” I said. “Him and Carletta had been watching them and getting all into it.”
“So his story,” Starr said. “Is all about Trout’s jaw, and how the aliens had abducted him to study it. He literally said, ‘Trout’s jaw has become a subject of intergalactic interest.’”
“That’s a direct quote,” I said.